Study finds some dogs benefit from short kennel stays

Many dog owners have had their vacations marred because they were so worried about how little Scruffy was faring in the boarding kennel back home.

But a new study indicates that some dogs aren't unusually stressed by short-term boarding. And some even find it exciting.

The study, funded by Dogs Trust, the largest dog welfare charity in Britain, was published in the journal Physiology & Behavior. Researchers measured several stress factors in 29 privately owned dogs both at home and in one of three private kennels chosen for the study.

The study found that dogs have higher levels of arousal and were generally more active in kennels than at home.

Can we conclude that a change of scenery might be a true benefit?

"Possibly," says principal investigator Lisa Collins from the University of Lincoln's School of Life Sciences in the United Kingdom. "It could be that the new environment, with all the new smells, new dogs, new sounds, new people, might be really stimulating in the short term. We cannot draw conclusions about whether this would be true over a longer stay of several weeks."

Collins says the next step will be to see whether certain breeds or dogs with particular behavioral patterns show differences in their ability to cope if they have longer stays.

"We are also very interested in the perception of the passage of time," Collins said, "and whether dogs judge time to be passing more slowly when they are experiencing a longer versus a short term stay in a kennel establishment."